Maebiki, by Lenox
I’m due for a new bandsaw blade, and I’ve been looking at trying out a bimetal bandsaw blade to get a longer lasting blade. These blades are typically made by laminating a piece of high speed steel to a carbon steel backing to form the teeth of the blade. I was marveling at this modern application of welding technology, and then I saw something on my maebiki that I hadn’t really noted before.
In these photos, you can clearly see a lamination line between the teeth and the main body of the maebiki. I took a small file to test the metal making up the tooth line and the metal making up the body of the saw, and they are clearly different types of steel, with the body being considerably softer than the tooth line.
This makes sense to me. Most Japanese saws are made from a single piece of hard steel, hammered out into the shape needed to make a ryoba, katana, or dozuki. If this same principle was applied to a maebiki, it would be a huge waste of steel, and would probably make the saw too brittle to use, given its size and thickness.
Now if I find a Japanese saw with carbide cutters welded to the tips of the teeth, I’ll be really impressed.
By the way, if anyone has recommendations on bandsaw blades that I should consider, please feel free to leave a comment. I like what I’ve read about the Lenox Diemaster 2, but I wish it came in a 1/2” x 0.025” 3 tpi configuration. The Lenox Tri-Master does have this configuration, but is quite a bit pricier.
Of all the “Shit Girls Say” parodies out there, you knew I was going to link to this one.
Note: the end credits are way too long. You can stop watching after 2:06. But the blooper reel is worth the time.
The Happiest And Unhappiest Cities To Work In
Gee — I always think the Popular Woodworking Magazine folks look like they have a lot of fun.
If you happen to work in Cincinnati, Buffalo, or Austin and you’re constantly down in the dumps—don’t worry. You’re not alone.
These three cities are where some of the nation’s unhappiest workers are, according to online career site CareerBliss.com.
Q:I think the other good thing to remember about a Roubo bench is that the weight provided by that extra bookcase of lumber is an important part of the design in and of itself. The stability you get from it is worth the extra board feet.
Yup. Although there are ways to immobilize a workbench besides sheer mass.
Still, having that big slab of wood to work on is awesome.
Overbuilt?
The current project of Marc Spagnuolo’s Wood Whisperer Guild is a split top Roubo workbench featuring hardware from Benchcrafted. Recently, Brian Tracey posted a writeup on his Roubo workbench on the Wood Whisperer site. In the comments on the bench, choots raises a good question about sustainability:
This is no doubt a well-crafted and beautiful piece. I’ve been admiring all the workbenches on this site for a while, and have been noticing a recent trend to more massive benches. I just have to interject a comment I have yet to see regarding most of them. Where is the responsibility and stewardship with wood in building a workbench like this? Is there really a need for such an amount of wood as this to make a sturdy, functional, and long lasting bench? You could make that top and those legs almost half as thick and you wouldn’t lose any functionality and it would still look great…. As woodworkers, we should be responsible with wood and able to produce designs that meet requirements for a reasonable cost with the least environmental impact possible. We need to be good stewards with the resources we have – the trend towards bigger is better in benches that I see here and elsewhere is troubling.
Luckily, this question can be answered pretty quickly with our good friend math.
My Roubo is made of construction lumber (Douglas fir), is 8’ long, 22” deep, has a 3-1/2” thick top, 5” square legs, is about 29” tall, and uses 4x4’s as stretchers. All together, that’s about 88 board feet of wood. If I add in the pine boards that I used for building a shelf across the stretchers for storage, that’s an additional 10 board feet.
The first bookcase plan that I found on the Fine Woodworking website is a freestanding bookcase that is about 5-1/2’ tall, 3-1/2’ wide, and 15” deep. It has 5 shelves. A quick calculation gives me about 40 board feet of lumber to make that project.
So these “massive” Roubo benches are the equivalent of 2-1/2 bookcases in terms of the wood used. Assume that you made another workbench design that uses half the wood of a Roubo. That saves about one bookcase worth of wood. I hardly think that this is an extravagant waste of resources given that a well-built workbench is something you will use every single time you step into your workshop.
And given that most people would make these benches out of relatively cheap or reclaimed wood, the sustainability issue becomes even less of a factor.
Disclaimer: I’m about as big of a lefty-socialist-hippie-commie-tree-hugging-bleeding-heart as you’ll find. I think that Gibson Guitars really was up to something (sorry, Shannon). Even so, I still think that trying to make the case that a Roubo bench is an extravagant waste of natural resources is a bit of an overstatement.
